A couple of weeks ago during the Vajrasattva empowerment Garchen Rinpoche said from now on we should view water as having the nature of water. This slipped my mind until last week while visiting the beach and reciting the Vajrasattva whilst in the ocean...

I find this idea intriguing, and I was wondering if anyone has anything to add to this. I'm not exactly sure what Rinpoche meant... I checked my notes, but I had only written down that brief statement.

meepmeep wrote:A couple of weeks ago during the Vajrasattva empowerment Garchen Rinpoche said from now on we should view water as having the nature of water. ...

Is this correctly written? Or did you mean "Vajrasattva as having the nature of water"?

I never heard this saying before, but have the immediate impression of it, that water is pure clear, colourless, cleansing, refreshing, brilliant, beautiful, ... and in the case of the ocean it is tremendous vast... and in the case of rain it is life giving.Such a nice metaphor!

This gets into the relationship between the five Buddha families and the elements. Vajrasattva (sometimes Akshobhya) is related to the element water. Amitabha & the Padma family is related to fire. and so on.

An accessible introduction to all this is in Luminous Emptiness by F. Fremantle.

I should add that H.E. Garchen Rinpoche is an authentic treasure. Much love and respect for him and his students.

Ask your teacher about the shower accumulation. I even recite the 100 syllable mantra on the toilet, but I don't count that toward anything

Um as for the five Buddha families, it's true--Vajrasattva is often seen as equivalent to or stand-in for Akshobya who is east/blue/water/anger (which is really mirrorlike Wisdom) except strictly speaking, when you are trying to view the five elements or sense objects as the complete mandala, the elements are actually the 5 Dakinis/wisdoms. So, Water is really Vajratopa or Nyema Karmo, the consort.

Ultimately its nondual, they aren't male/female separate entities or something. But it's so magical to think that all the skandhas and matter and energy are actually just the gross display of the 4 Dakinis in space. Whoah!

All this is my really poor explanation and understanding of the lyrical meditations in Magic Dance by Thinley Norbu Rinpoche. If you can find a copy, it's a magnificent book! So rich.

I started chanting Vajrasattva's 100-syllable mantra in the shower kind of spontaneously awhile ago, as it just occured to me it made sense that one can use the mundane action of showering--which is a gross version of purification after all--to do a more spiritual purification as well. Then later I heard that Garchen Rinpoche had suggested it..perhaps I'd heard him say and and simply forgotten. In Lama Yeshe's teachings on Vajrasattva practice, he also compares Vajrasattva to water in one of his descriptions of how to visualize the nectar 'rushing down the central channel with the kind of force as of a rushing stream of water that forces out the impurities by making them overflow out the top, as in a container.'(Sorry for the poor paraphrasing, hope you all get the idea!